ASUS WebStorage: A 0-star cloud storage service that you should NOT try

A comical expectation

ASUS has been offering some too-good-to-be-true storage offers such as 16.99$ for 1 TB of storage for a year, a discounted rate. Since it is really cheap, I decided to purchase it. It is my bad that I bought it without checking the reviews. Turned out, this service is a scam. You must never purchase it. It simply does not work. They are probably in their alpha-testing stage. In this stage, the service is unlikely to sustain and they must pay you to use their crappy product.

It literally took 24 hours to upload 8 GB of data and it got stuck there. The service indexes all the files that must be uploaded first. This indexing takes quite several hours. Then it starts uploading - at literally a speed of 800 kbps. Yay, welcome the days of late 1990s and the slow Internet. (To clarify, my Internet is quite strong - with upload speeds of at least 20 Mbps always, as per Speedtest.net). Then, it decides to randomly fail some files here and there without a reason. They were just like 5 MB files. You could ask their interface to retry. It will retry. And some files would still fail even after several tries. You have to literally babysit the app - and it would still fail for no reason. I guess, it caches some local failed version somewhere in their site and hence failing subsequent attempts.

Bot says I could get a refund

I asked for a refund in a day

Now, this is a simple browser-based upload of files. The binary they provide for Linux drops a segmentation fault and does not work at all. However, if just a simple upload is failing, how can you trust their app to auto-sync the files? Interestingly though, they were aiming high. They were asking you all to ditch Google and move your files to their service.

ASUS WebStorage performs poorer than the MSc projects we did in performance and usability. I cannot believe a professional company thought it is okay to release this as a public software. I have asked for a refund since their chatbot said they will refund if it was applied within 7 days since purchase. I asked for the refund in a day after purchasing this shitty service. But I am yet to hear from them. 

Trying to submit a customer complaint leaves me with this page:

 

 

 

 

 

Their web chat help is even more awful.

"there is nothing that can be done on our end."

The reply I received was, "My apologies, there is nothing that can be done on our end." This getting more and more interesting, day by day. From not providing the refund - to help departments being completely dismissive - asking everyone to contact using that unresponsive contact@asuswebstorage.com instead!

Is ASUS WebStorage a scam?

Verdict: Yes. ASUS WebStorage is a total scam.

 

Update as of December 1st: I eventually received the refund, after several communications back-and-forth. It was a bizarre experience, to put mildly.